Experience.FellowshipOne.com

HI guys!

First off thanks for everything you do - you produce a great system!

Do you have a published roadmap for dataexchange?  I have three efforts that our pastoral staff is really asking our techteam to take on, and if we can do it as a part of F1 or  integrated with F1, then all the better.

The first effort is to have kiosk-based online giving.  We would like to have a touchscreen-based application which allows people to walk up, scan their ID card to log into their account, and scan their credit/debit card to give their tithe or offering.  There are three ways this could happen:

  - You produce an app that does this - obviously we would love this :)

  - You allow secure submission of contributions, including credit cards to be run, through the DE API.

  - You allow submission of contribution records for informational purposes, and we will actually scan the cards.

The second effort is to have kiosk-based event registration and payment.  Again this would be a touchscreen-based application which allows people to walk up, scan their ID card, select the event, register, and pay for the registration with a credit card.  Payment options would be the same as in the first project, and for registration information:

  - You produce an app that does this - again hooray for you guys if you do!!!

  - You allow obtaining the weblink form 2.0 information through the DE API, and allow submission of form registrations through the DE API.
 

 The third effort is to have a touch-screen map-based small group locator.  We would like for people to walk up, choose whether they would like to see groups by interest or location, and if they choose location see a map of the area. They would click on their location, and a list of close groups would pop up.  Possibly, we could even allow them to 'register' through the kiosk, which would submit a contact through the DE API.  I realize you are unlikely to build this app, and we could even do standalone from F1 completely, but it would be nice if we could pull up the list of groups from here.

The fourth thing I would like to see is the ability to submit contacts through the DE API.  I would like to be able to publish our own forms, flash forms for example, and have them submit contacts into F1 to be worked by servant leaders.

Again, thanks for all you do!

Matt Clark 

Thank you for the kind words.

We don't publish our roadmaps publicly but rest assured DE is a key component for us. If you want to discuss it in more detail please give me a call directly.

I can address the three things you mention.

a) Giving kiosk - we discussed this heavily in Q4-06. We had a client willing to pay for part of the development costs. We reviewed our alternatives to building it ourselves or integrating with SecureGive.com.  The bottom line is that after speaking with other churches, some of whom have tried deploying a giving kiosk themselves, and weighing the marketability of this solution against other options (like developing a best in class Small Group system) then we simply could not justify it right now.  Doesn't mean we won't in the future, it just wasn't the right time now. I would encourage your church to really review the pros and cons of such an offering before embarking on it. If you do develop something on your own or use a third party like SecureGive I believe we could accomodate an import without much effort.

b)  Although not as sexy as a complete touchscreen based solution, a number of our client churches place kiosks in around their church that allows them to browse to the church's website and then use F1 WebLink for registration.  It's very effective and I personnally do not think the sexiness factor of the complete touchscreen solution outweighs the addtional costs to offer it to the congregation. At this time, that's really the only alternative but I'm open to discussing it more.

c) I have a client doing something similar through an extract we provide. The extract the information and populate a touchscreen interface they developed before signing up with F1. Call me to discuss the details.

d) That's an excellent idea and I'll make sure that's included for consideration in our active development pipepline for this year.

Curtis Simmons
VP, Product & Services 

I have a request similar to #3 of the above.

We are actually looking to take the Address info from F1 and create a church map through something similar to Google Maps so that we can help Small Group leaders better reach people who attend and live in their area.

From what I have read this is possible with some slight data manipulation through Google Maps, but I am not sure quite how to do it, or if it is completely safe to import all of our data into Google at all.

Do you have any Mapping Software that you work with to create church-specific maps from the F1 database?

I know that Google Maps has an API that you can use to generate maps for addresses on your site.  I've played with it for our church website and wanted to point out that there are definitely problems with the API.  When I mapped our church through maps.google.com, I had no problem getting the exact location of our church.  When I plugged the address into their API, it generated a pointer about 1 mile south of our church.  I needed to use another tool to tweak the numbers and then adjust the cache for that map and the location used.

If you're interested in doing this, I believe that Yahoo! and Google (possibly even MS) provide APIs that can be called with your data.  If you use Data Exchange to pull the addresses and then plug those into the API, you can get a pretty good general location for the addresses.  Yahoo! may be more accurate in some instances than Google, but all should work.  I remember reading a brief article on writing some CLR code in C# to translate SQL Server addresses into the specific codes generated by those APIs.  The WEC team has written a wrapper in PHP for Google Maps.  You may be able to use some of that code to generate something similar for your site.  The great thing about these is that you don't have to upload all of your data to Google/Yahoo!/etc - you just issue the calls and their APIs plot the points appropriately.  They should all have good forums to get some assistance when you need it.

I'm not much of a web programmer, but hope that these at least give you some ideas to look at for your web site.

In Him,

-Peter Schott
 

Thanks for the quick response.  I will pass this along to our web guy, as I got lost about halfway into your post :).

Jeff Johnson